The World's Columbian Exposition at the 'White City'

Patrick T. ReardonChicago Tribune

The World's Columbian Exposition, which opened on this date, was the most famous world's fair ever held on American soil. The fair, a celebration by the nation--and the world--of the 400th anniversary of the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus, had been the subject of a fierce competition among Chicago, New York, Washington and St. Louis.

Chicago not only won the fight but gained a nickname as well. In an attempt to turn Congress against the city on the prairie, New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana wrote: "Don't pay attention to the nonsensical claims of that windy city. Its people could not build a world's fair even if they won it." But build it Chicago did, on a 600-acre site in Jackson Park on the city's South Side. And the world came to gawk and marvel. Over its 179-day run, attendance at the fair totaled 27,529,400, or more than 150,000 people a day. Most visitors went more than once, but even after the multiple visits were accounted for, it was estimated that about 12 million peopleattended--this in a nation of about 63 million people.Nearly 129,000 people, including President Grover Cleveland, strolled the grounds on the rainy opening day. But it was fitting that the biggest crowd--716,881 people--jammed the exhibits on Chicago Day, Oct. 9, commemorating the 22nd anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.

For Chicago, the point of the fair was to prove that the city had risen, prosperous and strong, from the ashes and was ready to take its place in the front rank of the world's great cities.

The exposition was really two fairs in one: the official White City with its grand Neoclassical buildings filled with exhibits and the unofficial Midway outside the gates where visitors could ride the world's first Ferris wheel, a gigantic affair 264 feet in diameter, or watch exotic dancers, such as Fahreda Mahzar, later known as Little Egypt. "Your Fair, in spite of its astounding incongruities and its broad border of vulgarities, is a great promise, a great pledge even," Charles Eliot Norton, the nation's foremost expert on the poet Dante, told the Tribune. "It at least forbids despair. I have never seen Americans from whom one could draw happier auguries for the future of America than some of the men I saw in Chicago."

Not everyone was happy. Architect Louis Sullivan, who designed the fair's Transportation Building, complained that fair's reliance on classical models would set back American architecture by half a century. And blacks, welcomed as paying customers, found that they were vastly underrepresented in the exhibits. One prominent opponent was Ida B. Wells, who, after waging an anti-lynching campaign in the South, moved to Chicago in 1893. For Wells, the final straw came when, as a sop to blacks (but also as an attendance booster), fair officials scheduled a Colored People's Day, promising 2,000 free watermelons.

The fair came to a close amid mourning, rather than the scheduled speeches and parties. On the evening of Oct. 28, two days before the fair's final day, Mayor Carter Harrison was assassinated in his Near West Side home by a 25-year-old job-seeker. Four months later, fire destroyed or damaged six fair buildings and their still-valuable exhibits. Another fire occurred in February, and then in July 1894, a final conflagration leveled nearly all of the remaining structures.